A lighting device comprising a light-emitting device is known, for example, as a vehicle lighting device. Current vehicle lighting devices are filament-based devices, discharge-based devices or Light Emitting Diode (LED)-based devices. To realize the prescribed illumination characteristic with sufficient accuracy, these lighting devices have a considerable mechanical volume, which is mainly caused by the relatively large size of existing light-emitting devices or light sources, such as incandescent and high-intensity discharge lamps and LEDs. Furthermore, it is difficult to obtain more than one illumination characteristic or beam pattern from a single lighting device. Current filament-based vehicle lighting devices can produce a “high beam” and a “low beam”, addressable by switching between two different filaments.
In contemporary vehicles, e.g. passenger cars, there is a need for more different front lighting characteristics (e.g. parking light, daytime running light, side-pointing beam while making a turn, fog lights, and semi-high beam for use in situations with only distant oncoming traffic).
DE 42 28 895 A1 shows a lighting device which is formed as a vehicle lighting device and comprises a plurality of light-emitting devices formed as lasers for emitting light, and at least one optical element in an optical path of the light-emitting devices for generating output illumination having one static directional characteristic.